ANGELA RAYNER IS STARMER’S ELECTION SCAPEGOAT
Just 24 hours after saying he took ‘full responsibility’ for Labour’s disaster, Starmer sacks his deputy from key role, igniting fresh outbreak of vicious infighting at top of party
KEIR STARMER was accused of making his deputy Angela Rayner the scapegoat for Labour’s election meltdown last night, after he sacked her as party chairman and campaign co-ordinator.
In a desperate bid to bolster his authority, the Labour leader – who only 24 hours earlier said he took ‘full responsibility’ for the disastrous election results – removed Ms Rayner from the key roles.
Labour l ast night said Ms Rayner, who remains the party’s directly elected deputy leader, would ‘continue to play a senior role in Keir’s team’.
But in a sign she was taking the blame for last week’s results, a party source said Labour had to ‘change how we run our campaigns in the future’.
Ms Rayner declined to comment last night, but her departure sparked immediate claims that the Labour leader was making her a scapegoat. Former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said her sacking was a ‘cowardly ly avoidance of responsibility’, adding: ‘He’s He’s scapegoating everyone apart from himself.’ f.’
The sacking came shortly after Ms Rayner’s er’s allies told The Mail on Sunday that it was unfair to blame her for either the Hartlepool ool by-election loss to the Tories or the wider election disaster, claiming: ‘Everyone knows that Keir’s office controls everything.’
But other MPs said Ms Rayner should lose ose her posts for failing to stem the Tory tide.
Last night, there were reports that Ms Rayner would be only the first to go in a radidical reshuffle of Labour’s front bench – with ith claims that Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa isa Nandy would also be sacked, because ‘people ple around Keir think she’s disloyal’.
Shadow Home Secretary Nick ThomasasSymonds and employment spokesman Andy dy McDonald are also rumoured to be leaving ng the frontbench or moving to new posts. The dramatic turn of events came as: • Labour suffered another humiliating defeat yesterday by failing to oust West Midlands Tory mayor Andy Street; • Andy Burnham underlined his credentials as an eventual Labour leader by winning the Greater Manchester mayoral race; • Ex-Labour Cabinet Minister John Denham said the party under Sir Keir could be finished as ‘national political force’ because it ‘seems to have ‘turned its back on England and Englishness’; • MPs confirmed t hat Yvette Cooper was being lined up as a ‘compromise’ candidate to replace the Labour leader if the party’s fortunes did not improve.
Sir Keir had been expected to shake up his Shadow Cabinet this week by sacking Rayner ally Anneliese Dodds as Shadow Chancellor and bringing back ‘proven heavyweights’ such as Ms Cooper and exEnvironment Secretary Hilary Benn. Sources suggest frontbenchers David Lammy and Wes Streeting are being lined up for promotion.
However, sceptics sniped that after the massive 16 per cent swing to the Tories in the Hartlepool byelection, Remain backer Ms Cooper – who was just 1,276 votes ahead of
‘Labour could be finished as a national political force’
the Tories in her West Yorkshire seat in 2019 – is one of a dozen of Labour MPs set to lose their seats at the next General Election.
Last week’s catalogue of defeats – symbolised by Tees Valley Tory candidate Ben Houchen winning 73 per cent of the vote in a formerly staunch Labour area – sparked fierce internal recriminations.
The losses continued yesterday after Mr Street defied Labour’s Liam Byrne to hold on to the key prize of West Midlands mayor.
Labour pointed to success in Wales where First Minister Mark Drakeford held on to power. But the overall results sparked a frenzy of questions over how long Sir Keir could hang on as leader – especially if he presides over another defeat in a by-election which will be called in Batley and Spen if sitting Labour MP Tracy Brabin wins the West Yorkshire mayoral race today. Sir Keir is unlikely to face an immediate challenge as Left-wing MPs do not have the necessary 40- plus votes under the party’s rules to force a contest while the Right is prepared to give him more time.
Ex-Hartlepool MP Lord Mandelson claimed voters had still not forgiven Labour for Jeremy Corbyn’s Left- wing leadership, while the former leader himself savaged Sir Keir for encouraging people to vote for other parties by ‘offering nothing [and] offering insipid support for the Government’.
The terrible results also reignited
tensions bet between een Sir Keir’s office and the camp of deputy leader Ms Rayner, who has reportedly felt ‘blindsided’ by decisions taken by Sir Keir’s team.
The Mail on Sunday was told that the leader’s staff were ‘incandescent’ at Ms Rayner for her ‘botched’ intervention in the selection of candidates in Liverpool in the wake of allegations of corruption in the local party.
Sources close to the leader’s office said MPs briefing against Ms Rayner were not doing so on behalf of Sir Keir.
But ominously for what was to come, they insisted that as election co-ordinator, she had obviously had a role in the planning for both the elections overall and the Hartlepool contest in particular.
One source said it was ridiculous for anyone to suggest that in election meetings, ‘ Angela just sat there mute and let everyone else get on with it’. ‘She is a big figure and she made her presence felt.’
Mr Denham, Local Government Secretary under Gordon Brown, seized on the Hartlepool result as a symbol of the current party’s failure to connect with towns outside the big metropolitan areas.
Mr Denham, now professor of English Identity and Politics at Southampton University, said: ‘Ordinary voters outside the big metropolitan areas don’t feel Labour shares their pride in being English.’
That cost the party so dearly in Hartlepool because it was ‘such an English town’. And Mr Denham questioned the strength of Sir Keir’s patriotism, saying: ‘ The Union flag hanging behind Starmer is a soggy Britishness, not English enough for England nor Scottish enough for Scotland’.
HARTLEPOOL was more than a horror for the Labour Party. More than a humiliation. It was a colossal, life- threatening defeat such as engulfed and eventually destroyed the Liberal Party 100 years ago.
Not a routine defeat for a government in a by- election but a complete crushing by a Government which the Labour Party had attempted to pillory for sleaze for months because it had nothing else to offer. A party under a shiny, new forensically intelligent leader who was going to be a herald of change. Or so we thought.
Well, that’s not how voters up and down the country, north and south, east and west – and especially in Hartlepool – saw Sir Keir Starmer on Thursday.
They saw a man who served faithfully in Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet, who fought for another Brexit referendum until he was the last politician standing and who chose an anti-Brexit Remainer to defend one of the most proBrexit seats in the country.
Sleaze is endemic among politicians in all countries, with Bill Clinton, a Labour favourite, among them. But Clinton will be remembered for saying ‘It’s the economy, stupid’, not for a denying he had sex with Monica Lewinsky.
Bill Clinton was a liar. So is Boris Johnson. Most people accept it.
But they also see the successes of these people. That is what they vote for. Not for what a man does in his personal life but for what he does for them. Why else did 75 million Americans vote for Donald Trump last year?
When Corbyn offered the economics of bankrupt Venezuela, Johnson sang: ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’
When Covid came along, Johnson, leader of the party that proclaims it is careful with your money, spent it like a drunken sailor.
And the question that voters asked last week was this: ‘What are your economics, Sir Keir?’
They weren’t interested in the price of Johnson’s wallpaper. They wanted to know when they’ll get a house of their own. And put up wallpaper of their own.
I know what it is like to have aspirations. I grew up in a bug-ridden, gas-lit slum in Rotherhithe and the docks of South-East London. It was that which made me join Labour.
And it was when Jeremy Corbyn threw the party into reverse gear that I allowed my membership to lapse.
Corbyn is the spectre that haunts Labour. There are still people who want him back, antisemitism and all. Hartlepool was the chance to end all that, to remodernise, make it the party of this century. Not Keir Hardie’s but Keir Starmer’s.
But he didn’t take it. For years, his circle and many others in the party have believed that life began in London and that the ‘Northern thickos’ could be relied upon to vote Labour come Hell or high water.
The so- called ‘ Red Wall’ of the North, with its huge Labour majorities, was a patronising myth. Scotland should have taught Labour that. The once-impregnable ‘tartan wall’ didn’t exist, either.
And not only Scotland, but the EU referendum. The pro-Remain cause cherished by Sir Keir offered the working classes of the North the status quo. Which is to say more of the same – unemployment, bad housing and the aura of poverty.
Boris Johnson offered them hope of something better through Brexit and they voted for it. As they did on Thursday.
The successful Labour leaders of the past did just the same. Harold Wilson, my old boss, radiated the prospect of a glittering future based on new technology – a future that offered way more hope and optimism than the grouse moors of Tory leaders Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas Home.
Wilson wasn’t a Londoner. He was born in Yorkshire and represented a Lancashire seat.
Tony Blair was educated in Scotland and represented a seat in Durham. He began the modernisation of the Labour Party. He junked the ‘nationalise everything’ Clause Four of its constitution.
He didn’t go round humming The Red Flag every day – and the party hated him for it.
Wilson didn’t pose, as Starmer did, eating the supposed staple food of the working class: fish and chips.
I was with Wilson, lunching without a camera in sight, when he ordered his meals from the menu. With ketchup. Wilson might have been middle-class in his upbringing but his father was unemployed for two years.
The truth is that the Labour Party has lost its roots. Hartlepool was a chance to replant some of them and it wasn’t taken.
Labour’s greatest danger now is that it will shrug off Thursday’s elections as a Covid bounce, that it will resume its search for sleaze, continue to say that everything the Government does is too little, too late and hope that something will turn up. It hasn’t recognised that the Tory Party has changed. The Tories are no longer the party of estate owners but the party of estate agents, slick young men and women with policies they’re prepared to throw overboard if the voter doesn’t like them.
The Tory Party is interested in power. The Labour Party is only interested in its principles, however outmoded.
One looks to Marks & Spencer for its voters. The other has too many who look to Marx and Engels.
One wants to be the majority power. The other is in danger of being a permanent minority party or, worse, the party of minorities.
There is no group too small or remote or too batty for Labour to demand the Government does something for them. Strings of acronyms – LGBTQ-plus? – flow from their lips.
They demand that the Government does something about the wickedly oppressed Muslims in China, but what can they do? Protest, that’s what. A golden word that substitutes for action on the Left. They should concentrate on helping Muslims nearer home.
The only place they do have power these days is within the Labour Party itself. And how are they using that?
The Left came up with its answer as early as Friday morning: go back to old-fashioned socialism. Nationalise anything that moves. Sing The Red Flag and its dirge about the
A colossal life-threatening defeat… for a party with nothing to offer
Old-fashioned socialism? It’s the last thing the Labour Party needs
martyrs whose life-blood dyed its every fold. That’s the last thing the party needs.
Labour can’t get rid of Starmer, for the brutal truth is that there is no one else. But it can face facts.
The only way Starmer can free his party from the past is to jettison it, to finish the work that Blair began.
To offer a bright future, to sing about a New Dawn not the old Luddite hymns.
By all means attack the Government and its trail of incompetent decisions. But that is not enough. The voters have aspirations.
Recognise them. And give them inspiration.
Hartlepool is on the list of Government Freeports, bringing jobs and prosperity to the area.
Can Labour better that? HS2 stretches north – stretch it further. Make railways cheaper. Compel developers to GIVE land to local councils as a condition of permission to build.
Start a major prefab housing industry and fill the thousands of unused plots of land around the country.
And get funny. Crack a joke every now and again. Lighten up. Go to a football match to watch it, not to be seen.
Be patriotic but don’t fly a flag from every window. In other words, be normal. Just like the people you hope will vote for you.
Oh, and whatever else you do, don’t place a wreath at the grave of a Palestinian terrorist. There are no votes in it.